[antlr-interest] Build Question

Tiller, Michael (M.M.) mtiller at ford.com
Tue Mar 12 06:47:59 PST 2002


A few followup comments...

I was hoping to support both Java and C++ for future development.  It seems like this is impractical for the following reasons:

1) Trying to write a language independent way comment rule that "eats" comments doesn't seem possible.
2) Perhaps for misguided reasons, I'd like to be able to add "child" nodes to my AST during tree construction.  It isn't clear to me how that can be done in a language neutral way.  It would be nice if ANTLR's tree construction shorthand were extended to allow this.
3) The target language has to be specified in the grammar (couldn't this be a command line option?)
4) The difficulties with trying to do grammar inheritance (see below).

This isn't really criticism (ANTLR is a great tool).  Consider it ideas for future releases.  Because of these problems, I think I'm going to have to abandon my hope of a language neutral grammar and just start plugging in my C++ code.

--
Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ric Klaren [mailto:klaren at cs.utwente.nl]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 3:51 AM
> To: antlr-interest at yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] Build Question
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 01:03:27PM -0500, Tiller, Michael 
> (M.M.) wrote:
> > So far so good I imagine (although I haven't gotten far 
> enough to figure
> > out if this is a good idea yet).  The problem I'm running 
> into is that I
> > imagine these grammars may be shared among several distinct 
> applications.
> > For that reason, I keep the ".g" files away from everything 
> else.  So when
> > I run ANTLR, the Makefile rule looks like this:
> >  
> >  $(ANTLR) -glib $(ROOTDIR)/base.g -o $(GENDIR) 
> $(ROOTDIR)/base_java.g
> >  
> > where GENDIR is the location for the generated code and 
> ROOTDIR is where I
> > keep the .g files.  This way, I can generate the set of 
> source files for
> > each project based on the grammars.
> >  
> > The problem is that when you use grammar inheritance, ANTLR 
> expands the
> > complete grammar into "expandedbase_java.g".  Except that 
> it actually names
> > it "expanded$(ROOTDIR)/base_java.g" (where ROOTDIR is 
> actually expanded).
> > In other words, it assumes that the ".g" is in the current 
> directory.
> >  
> > Any suggestions about how to avoid this problem?  I'm 
> surprised that I
> > can't explicitly specify the name of the expanded grammar.  
> That would have
> > been a nice option.
> 
> Been there done that. Doesn't work. It needs some serious 
> fixing in antlr
> to make this behave well. I already looked at it when I ran 
> into it, it's
> not completely easy to fix in antlr. I currently copy .g 
> files around with
> Make rules to get the right behaviour.
> 
> I personally must say that I found antlr's grammar inheritance pretty
> useless (gives to little control over what you want to 
> override, in the end
> you end up copying action code in a complicated way so I 
> figured I'd better
> copy stuff around in an easy way). YMMV though I suspect some 
> ppl on the
> list may have gotten nice results with it.
> 
> Ric
> --
> -----+++++****************************************************
> *+++++++++-------
>     ---- Ric Klaren ----- klaren at cs.utwente.nl ----- +31 53 
> 4893722  ----
> -----+++++****************************************************
> *+++++++++-------
>  Time what is time - I wish I knew how to tell You why - It 
> hurts to know -
>           Aren't we machines - Time what is time - Unlock the door
>                - And see the truth - Then time is time again
>                 From: 'Time what is Time' by Blind Guardian
> 
> 
>  
> 
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